My TBR

I currently have over 700 physical books that I own but haven’t read. By almost any measure, that’s too many. My full library is available to peruse at LibraryThing or on TinyCat if you prefer. In order to combat the total choice paralysis occasioned by the length of my TBR, I exported the list under the tag “TBR – Home” and ordered them by title, rather than author. My theory behind this was that if I did it by title, rather than author, I would avoid the fatigue of reading a number of books of the same genre/author back to back.

I ended up with the below list. I did some light editing where titles had come out a bit messed up, and I edited out things like sequels where I don’t own the first book and books I no longer intended to read. I’ve not been terribly thorough, so there are probably things I’ll encounter as I go along that I should have changed. You’ll notice that Google Sheets doesn’t ignore an initial “A” or “The” when alphabetising, so there’s a disproportionate number of books under A and T. I decided to just ignore this, as the point wasn’t to create an accurate list so much as to make sure the books were sufficiently mixed.

The result was the below 642 books. I’ve colour-coded these as I’ve gone along. Green means that I’ve read the book – red that I started, but didn’t finish – and blue that I skipped over it (or intend to) and will come back to it later. This is mainly for books I’m reading for particular challenges or clubs and for books that I want to read in a specific way or order. It’s completely ad hoc and I generally add notes to these as I go along which you can see here on the full spreadsheet. The sheet does not include most of the books I’ve purchased this year, as I want to focus on clearing our backlist.

It seems to be working, as I’m clearing more of my TBR this year than I previously have been!